Friday, March 6, 2015

CLIC Marketing Task Force Update

In the five months since CLIC's Marketing Workshop with Kathy Dempsey, the CLIC Marketing Task Force has been hard at work crafting pilot projects to promote reference and resource sharing services at the member libraries. The Task Force is beginning the marketing cycle by gathering data from the libraries' communities in three ways: (1) focus groups, (2) "Question of the Week," and (3) CLIC/ILL analogy contest.

The Task Force will use focus groups at each CLIC school to gather data on students' knowledge of reference services provided by their libraries. Dr. Jennifer Kloos of St. Catherine University met with the Task Force to train us on the fundamentals of focus groups, and we are now in the process of developing the focus group questions.

"Question of the Week" is an initiative to gather data from people visiting the libraries. Each school will have a board prominently displaying a Question of the Week in the library, and library users will be encouraged to write their answers to the questions on post-it notes.

In determining how to promote resource sharing, the Task Force said that it was difficult to explain to users the difference between borrowing from CLIC and ILL. They concluded that an analogy would be helpful. The Task Force will hold a contest among CLIC library student workers to come up with a CLIC/ILL analogy that can be used in a marketing campaign.